A sunny garden on the Isle of Wight, with a glass of fresh orange juice and a plate of toast and Marmite.

Alone, in a place of utter peace.

With the wash of the sea in the distance, birds singing, pears ripening fatly on the trees and gentle flower scents wafting on a warm breeze. An elderly ginger cat ambling around the flower-beds and a red squirrel climbing cautiously along the fence to investigate some nuts on the bird-table.

Perfect.

Maybe your perfect moment is different. Maybe it isn’t peace and solitude – perhaps you’re celebrating at a happy family gathering, or sipping tequilas on a palm-fringed beach with friends, or looking out at a crowded auditorium, finishing the best speech of your life, as the audience erupts in applause.

But we can’t always stay in those perfect moments. Life has a way of intruding. We have families, jobs, friends, responsibilities – and life won’t just be ignored while we sit around drinking orange juice in sunny gardens.

You don’t need to be middle-aged to have a midlife crisis, but it helps. It can happen as early as age 30, but now that we’re all living longer, ‘middle age’ often refers to 45-65 year-olds.

Middle age isn’t as much fun as we expected it to be. We’re old enough to know the things we shouldn’t do, but young enough to decide to do them anyway, and now we can’t blame anyone else when they go horribly wrong.

We think we’ve got life sussed, but somehow the goal-posts seem to keep moving. The more we learn, the less we know. We’re determined to live within our incomes, but somehow we keep borrowing more money. We’re surrounded by friends and family, but we’ve never felt more alone.

We’ve made a bit of progress with our careers, but perhaps not as much as we’d hoped, and now we’re worried about losing our jobs because at our age, we’d be unemployable. We know each other well enough to achieve great sex, but to be honest we’d rather have an ibuprofen and watch TV in bed.